The blocksize parameter tells bzip to use 100 000 Byte * blocksize blocks to compress the string. In the example above we can see the output size and time needed of bz[2] to bz[9] are nearly the same, because there ware just 189 058 Byte of data to compress and in this case bz[2] to bz[9] means "compress all data et once".So we may notice a bigger difference in speed and compression rate with bigger files.

the workfactor parameter sets, how fast bzip switches in the slower fallback algorithm, if the standard algorithm gets problems with much repetitive data. 0 means, bzip uses the default value of 30. This option is recommend.